UK Consumers Splash the Cash When Shopping on Smartphones

Digital shoppers are increasingly smartphone shoppers in the UK

According to Q4 2015 data from Criteo, mcommerce transactions among digital retailers in the UK accounted for 45.6% of total ecommerce transactions on its platform. A February 2016 report from Demandware, meanwhile, found that 32% of ecommerce orders on its platform in the UK were placed on smartphones during the 2015 Christmas shopping season.

While smartphone ecommerce traffic was actually slightly higher in the US during this period, by three percentage points, the proportion of orders was considerably higher in the UK—32% vs. 23% in the US. Consumers in the UK are clearly very adept mobile, and particularly smartphone, shoppers and buyers.

When consumers are in the mobile environment, apps prove to offer the greatest potential value to retailers. According to Q4 2015 data from cloud-based app commerce platform Poq, mobile apps not only saw greater engagement—an average 7.33 sessions per user—but also returned far greater revenues per user. They even outperformed desktop sites—£5.86 ($8.95) vs. £4.05 ($6.18) per user.

Greater engagement with mobile apps over the mobile web isn’t all that surprising. After all, when a mobile user downloads an app, they are making a conscious decision to engage. With retail apps, that engagement is all the more pronounced. But the fact that mobile app users were more valuable than even desktop web users was particularly striking. Mobile shoppers in the UK are a particularly worthy target for retailers, it seems.

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